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Crucial in a sense, yet perhaps inconsequential, there to be passed beyond—is that of the condition or the fate, shall we say, of literature today?

      My subject is that combination of importance and inconsequentiality known as the lyric—which for me at least is the most economical if not quintessential instantiation of literature.

      Jacques Derrida has always written about authors deemed literary but recently he has dealt more frequently with the idea of literature itself. For example, he speaks of literature as

      Here is another passage from the same text; an interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (1992):

      Finally, here is a passage from “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” which recapitulates with a difference:

      Thinking about literature thus seems directed to work eventually to elucidate a certain relation between literature and democracy: is it a metonymical relationship (where literature is linked to what gives rise to democracy), or a metaphorical relation (where literature’s performativity is at least analogous to that of acts of constitution), or a relation of identity of discursive regimes, or a relation of mutual entailment (you can’t have one without the other)?

      The second connecting factor in these passages is the performativity of literature and of the discursive regimes of politics, both of whose discourses work to bring into being the situations they purport to describe. Since appeal to the notion of performativity has become very widespread of late, as the success of Judith Butler’s brilliant Gender Trouble has led people in gender studies and queer theory to take up the notion, it is important to stress that performativity is the name of a problem rather than a solution, that it draws attention to the difficulty of determining what can be said to happen, under what conditions, and to the fact that the event is not something that is simply given. Once again, it is the conjunction of literature and politics through the notion of performativity that gives the complexity of the problem a chance of being elucidated.

      But the idea of literature that emerges from such deconstruc-tive reflections on the relation of literature and democracy is not itself my subject, though I hope we may have the opportunity to pursue it. In discussions of the sort I have been quoting, Derrida distinguishes between literature—this modern institution, with its possibility of tout dire—and something else: poetry (or some times belles lettres). And so it is in this context, where literature is linked with democracy and described in terms of a certain hyper responsibility and a performativity of the word, that I want to ask about poetry, particularly the lyric. To put the problem most simply, if we can maintain “no democracy without literature,” it seems considerably harder to imagine claiming, “no democracy without poetry,” or vice versa. What, then, can we say of lyric? What is its relation to the freedom and the performativity that are crucial to the modern idea of literature?

      O Huncamunca, Huncamunca,

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